“What is the return on investment with online video marketing?”

It's a question we get asked often and there is no easy answer, but we tackled it live on Facebook.

Transcription:

Angela: Hey, we're live. I don't think it gave us a 3, 2, 1 today. Did you see a 3, 2, 1?

Scott: I didn't.

Angela: Welcome, everyone, to our live video. It's Tuesday, October 17th. I'm Angela. I had to think about the date. I'm Angela. This is Scott. Today we're talking about ROI on your video, right?

Scott: Yeah. Someone asked a question. They watched an old live video that Ange and I did back in August, and their question was, "How do you determine what the return on investment is on your online video marketing?" I thought, what a great question, so I thought we'd tackle it today because it's actually not one that's easy to answer, and there actually is no finite answer to that question.

Angela: No. Before we get started because we say when you're doing your Facebook Live, just wait a couple of minutes because Facebook takes time to serve you live to people, and you don't want to get into the details before people are in. I just want to take a second. Who is on with me now? If I can get a thumbs up, that would be great, and I will make sure to say hello. If you have questions, whether it's about ROI or a video, make sure that you ask them. You know what, the other thing we teach is consistency. You were going to say something about that.

Scott: That was a nice segue. Thank you very much. Yeah, I was going to talk about consistency. It's Katie. Hey, Katie.

Angela: Hey, Katie.

Scott: Consistency. We talk about consistency a lot and the importance of posting your videos consistently, weekly. If you're going live, go weekly, same time every week. There's lots of reasons to that. People know when to find you. There's a trust factor that you're reliable if you go live at the same time every week. Last week we were ... Amanda's here too. Hey, Amanda.

Angela: Hey, Amanda.

Scott: Last week we were on vacation in the Bahamas, and we decided we were going to go live in the Bahamas when we were down there. I think we were lying on the beach having a cold drink.

Angela: At 10 a.m. I think we were.

Scott: Then Angela turned to me, and she's like, "We were supposed to go live." We didn't. We weren't being very consistent, but we're working on it. It's difficult when you're going away. With the prerecorded videos, I programmed it automatically so when we were away they just get released automatically and that's definitely the way to do it by doing block shooting, shooting several and then automating it or pre-programming them so they automatically get released no matter what. With the live videos, if you're away for a week, it is difficult to even remember because you're in vacation mode in your head, so it's hard to remember to actually go live. We had a great trip, and here we are. We're back. We have a good topic today. I know Manny who just jumped in now. We're talking about ROI and how do you track the ROI of online video marketing.

Angela: Yes. Return on investment in video marketing is just not cut and dry. It's not black and white. I think if you're looking for this definitive answer, I don't think we're going to have anything super definitive today, but it's going to be insightful. There's so many factors. When you do something like a newspaper ad, you can look at the newspaper ad and at the end, you can say I spent A, I got three new clients from it, and so that was my ROI. Then there's the exposure that you're getting that you might not know people are contacting you because of that. Video is like that but even more so, right? The first thing is, I guess, knowing what your investment is. Are you doing your videos yourself, or did you pay a production company $10,000 to do a single video? I think knowing what your investment is first is super important.

One thing about video is even five years ago, even two years ago, you had to invest in video. You had to really have a professional do your video, and it was really noticeable if you didn't. Two to five years ago, your investment was for a cheap video $2,500, $10,000, $20,000, and you had to really be careful, making sure that your investment was getting a return and that you were doing the right things. Then you had to pay for distribution. Did you have to put it on TV? Did you have to pay for some SEO of that video even? It was really, really costly, right? You have to determine what your cost is for your video investment. Now, your smartphone, a little bit of equipment, maybe some training. What is the investment now? It can be very little for very powerful videos. Now I say videos because you need to do more than one.

Scott: Yeah, and so my take on it, and this is probably a topic that we could probably speak hours about because I have my ideas of how I feel about it, and so does Ang. There's so many directions you can go when we're talking about ROI. I'm a fan of Gary Vaynerchuk, Gary V. I'm sure a lot of you guys know Gary V. I can't remember the video. I wish I could find it, but he always got asked the question, what's the ROI on social media marketing? I think it drove him nuts because there is no real answer. I mean, it really depends on your metric. A lot of business owners, especially sort of medium to large enterprise businesses, they want dollar. If I'm going to spend $1,000, am I going to get a return of 100% or 20%, and what is that? To me, that's an old school way of thinking. I think it made sense. If you were to spend $10,000 on a marketing video and that was your production cost and then at the end of the video you said to get a 10% discount, quote this code, so when people called in and made a purchase, they got the code, they could then very easily figure out, okay, my investment was X and my return was X, and then they've got their answer.

Things have changed so much now with marketing, especially social media, where video has now become part of social media so it's a tool. It's a social media marketing tool, so it gets lumped in with all that social media stuff. There is no way to directly measure the return on investment. If I spend this amount of money creating a Facebook image or a Facebook video and putting it online, there's no direct way for the types of videos that we teach people how to do to exactly track that. Most of us also know that it is about seven touches that you need to make before a client will convert, so are you going to take all seven of those into consideration? It's very tricky to track it, so what I wanted to share was when you think about return on investment, if you're going to put a video online, think of the return in engagement. What is the engagement that you got? I'm not talking from your mom and your friends or whatever but all-

Angela: Most of your target audience.

Scott: Yeah, most of your target audience, but on your business page, what sort of engagement are you getting? I think that's a really good way to look at it. Now that said, if you're getting into Facebook ads and you're doing video ads, then you can absolutely nail down your return on investment down to the penny, which is really, really cool, and it's something we're going to cover in one of our upcoming courses. Create your video. Say you spend $1,000 on your video, then you put it online and you spend $300 with Facebook ads to help promote that video, so it's at $1,300, and then if you have the conversion pixel, now we're getting into a little detail here, but on your website where people actually buy, Facebook then will calculate exactly, oh that person bought, and then it will show you right there exactly what your return on investment was, what did it cost me to ... You have to factor in obviously the cost of the video production, but you can determine it right down to the penny, if that's what you're looking to do. The main type of video that we teach people how to do, which is getting new people in your [inaudible 00:08:03] leads, it's very tricky. My advice is to pay more attention to the engagement, and that's how you should track your return on investment.

Angela: Yeah. I agree. Whoever is still on with us, tell me if you are doing video or if you have done video, how has that worked as far as engagement with your target audience? Has it worked? Has it not worked? Do you get people engaging, sharing? I want to know about that.

Scott: While we wait for someone to answer that, something I wanted to address too is we have a couple clients, and I've got a couple stories, so I'm going to share that with you guys while see if anyone has anything to share with us. We have one client that did a video with us, and they spent $250 on a video.

Angela: A pop-up video.

Scott: It was a pop-up video if anyone knows what a pop-up video is. Their rate of return, I think they calculated it, this was roughly 30 days after they invested in that video. They paid us to do the video. I don't even know if they boosted it, but you could calculate that in it as well, but it didn't matter because the rate of return was so ridiculous, we didn't even want to mention it or put it in print. Wasn't it like 1,300%?

Angela: Yeah.

Scott: It was like 1,300% was the return on this video in the first 30 days. This video is still out there, still generating leads. I mean, it's probably very tricky to determine at this point, but without a doubt, the client knew exactly what their return on investment was for that video. However, we have other clients who have spent $5,000 with us, and they've gotten no return. They felt like they threw their money away. Sometimes, this is going back a few years when we did a lot of corporate work, is they'd spend like ... Oh, sorry. Amanda's ...

Angela: Video is always way better than a post with a pic.

Scott: Yeah, absolutely.

Angela: They would spend $5,000 ...

Scott: They would spend ... Yeah, I didn't know where I was going there. Some of the corporate clients would spend $5,000 and get no return. That's where I was going. It was distribution. Where did they put their videos? They kind of buried their video on their website, and so there was no return on investment. You got someone who spent very little money and someone who spent a lot of money, but it really came down to distribution. Anyway, it was just one example. Videos are definitely better than a post with a pic, but again, I think it depends on what you're looking to accomplish as well. I wonder, Amanda, if we should be always even promoting today's live broadcast, should that have been a video? Should I have done a video saying, "Hey, it's Scott here. We're going live at 10 a.m. to talk about this." Maybe we should. I'm not too sure, but right now we're using a Canva?

Angela: Yeah.

Scott: A cheap, little image thing that we make. I mean, I'm going to experiment with that because maybe we should be doing more video. What's Katie saying?

Angela: The videos that she makes get shared more often, but it's hard to tell how much income is coming from that. For sure, and I think it's tricky, right? I mean, how many new clients are you getting? I guess in different fields it will be different because we'll do a video, and then that person will sign up. Again, because all of our marketing is online, but, like Scott said, we're using the pixel and the conversion pixel we know, so there's that. I was going to mention a couple things with ROI because I think it would be important-

Scott: Before you leave that though, Katie, I believe you did mention to me that you know for sure that you got a client, and you asked them how they heard of you or whatever. They said, "Oh, I saw your videos." It's always great when you get a new client to ask them, "Where did you hear about them," to find out what was the best marketing that you did. Without a doubt, I believe that if you're doing good videos, and Katie you do great videos, that a lot of your leads are going to come from that. Even if they saw you somewhere else or they were at an event that you were at, it's the videos that they're going to remember.

Angela: Yeah.

Scott: Sorry, you were going to say.

Angela: No, I was going to say, when you're looking at ROI on your videos, I think there's a couple of important elements. The first one is consistency, and you talked about consistency on when the videos go out and that's one thing, but I think consistency in your messaging. For example, if you're a travel agent, I'm just going to use you, Amanda. If you're a travel agent, then your video messages should always be solving a problem for your target demographic. It should be who you are, what you do, and how you solve that problem for them. You have to keep that messaging in what you do and who you are clear with the how you solve your problem.

I think what's happening with social media right now is people are getting excited maybe about some of the buzz they're creating in their videos, and they start to branch off. They'll start talking about what they do. They'll get some success, and they'll be like, "I have this really important message because I've been doing yoga lately. Even though I do video production, yoga is really changing my life, so next week I'm going to do my video about yoga." That's where the consistency is key. You need to be consistent in who you are, what you do, and how you solve the problem on every single video. You can't start going off on tangents because that will decrease your ROI for sure.

Scott: Yeah. Absolutely. I agree with you. We say at our seminars as well, everything needs to be on point, value to your target audience, but ... Sorry. I didn't turn all my notifications off, and I'm reading text notifications on my phone. I should have turned that off. Shoot, what was I saying?

Angela: Consistency.

Scott: Oh, yes. That's what I was going to say is that it's really important to make sure everything's on point all the time, value for your target audience, but don't be afraid every once in a while to show people that you are a human being, that you're not just this robot that's doing these great marketing value based videos. It's easy to do in live videos, like we talked about being on vacation and missing our post, so you know that we're real human beings and we make mistakes. In your shorter marketing [inaudible 00:14:37] that is tricky. Every once in a while, I think it's okay to stray slightly, but try to always bring it back somehow to your target audience and what the purpose of the videos are.

Angela: Yeah, and then we talk about touches. You talked about that a little bit in about the distribution. You can't just make one video, put it out there, get a little bit of buzz, have it fizzle out, and then say, "Oh, my video didn't work." You have to keep doing video. You have to keep getting that touch. The ROI also depends on how many you're doing, right? Again, I'm really of the mind that I don't want to just do one video for my clients. I'd rather do a series of videos, or I'd rather support them in a whole campaign of videos because I know that even if those videos are not as amazing and high end and huge investment in each single video, if it's a smaller investment in each video, but they're being consistent and put out consistently and the marketing is done consistently, I know they'll get a bigger return than doing one kick butt commercial and putting it out there, right?

Scott: No. Absolutely.

Angela: Especially for small business. I think that with consistency with who you are, what you do, how you solve a problem, but also not just doing one video and putting it out there and deciding that video does or doesn't work. You have to be consistent with those touches. We've talked to people before, and it's like, well, if you get a photo done and you put that photo on a business card, are you tracking that ROI, right? There's certain things. It's touches and getting out there and getting people to know you ...

Scott: Yeah, exposure.

Angela: ... and trust you. It's exposure. There are some ways of tracking it. I think to sum it up, if you're using Facebook ads or some type of very specific ads as you're promoting your video or you just have to realize that your engagement is going up, that you're getting more fans and your fans are more engaged. You have to decide, like any type of marketing, is this going to be a direct ROI or indirect. Of course, indirect always takes longer, so don't do it for a month or two months or three months. You need to be consistent and let that build.

Scott: Yep, no, absolutely. I sometimes get a lot of pushback when we're doing live presentations about ROI. What is the ROI? The thought just came to my mind right now is pop or beer ads. When you see a commercial on television for Coca-Cola, you don't see them as often as you ... Actually Coke ads, there's lots of them out there right now. Coca-Cola doesn't spend half a million dollars. I don't even know what they'd spend, maybe $200,000 on a Coke ad and put it on television and pay the distribution fees of whatever it is, a million dollars, on that Coke ad, and then ask the marketing agency, "What's my return on investment?" They don't ask that because that's not important. We're getting more into branding. That's really about branding, and Coke trying to push on us who they think that we should look at them as. Yeah, I'm the romantic and all that stuff that their current ads are. Just as an example, all your marketing, there doesn't have to be a dollar figure on what's the return on investment. These are touches that happen in very different areas where your audience is hanging out online.

Anyway, so we're going to wrap it up shortly. There was no straight answer to what's the ROI in video marketing. If there's one nugget that I'd say take away with your video marketing is look at your return on investment by engagement, who's engaging eyeballs, how long are they watching it? I think that's the best way to do it. Ask your clients when they book with you or whatever, "Where did you hear about me?" If they say video, it's obviously do more video. If it's a blog post, well maybe you should be doing more blog posts. Does anyone have any questions before we wrap it up? We're here to answer any questions about video marketing or anything in general.

We were in Florida Keys, which got hammered by the Hurricane Irma. Irma? I can't remember. There's been so many hurricanes this year. They got hammered, and we were there. It was amazing how they cleaned up so fast. You could see remnants of the damage or whatever, but I was really, really impressed with how quickly they tidied up. That's my non-sequitur for the ending of this. I guess it's not completely a non-sequitur because we did talk about it earlier. Anyway, you have anything else?

Angela: No. I think that's it. For me, when you look at your ROI, my advice is consistency, so putting out your videos often, doing more of what's working, so looking at the videos that are the most successful and doing more of that, looking at your stats, being consistent in your messaging and being consistent in how often you post. Those are my key giveaways for you this week, and I hope to hear from you to know how your video marketing is going. If you have an ROI, send it to us. We'd love to know.

Scott: Lisa, we will see you on Thursday. We're in Kitchener on Thursday if anyone wants to stop in and see us. Go to our website, go to videopowerup.com, click on free seminar. We're in-

Angela: Whitby tomorrow.

Scott: We're in Whitby tomorrow. I don't know if there's any Whitby people watching right now. I don't think so. I know there might be some Kitchener people. Yeah, we're at Kitchener Public Library tomorrow at I think it's 10 a.m.

Angela: Yeah.

Scott: Videopowerup.com, and you can sign up for their free seminar there.

Angela: Everybody have a great day and a great week, and we will see you next week.